CATS’ EYES ON THE PRIZE
Kilkenny’s Reid says players taking league seriously amid fears of falling into lower division in 2025 rejig
IT’S not clear yet whether The New York Times has provisional flights booked to Dublin for July. If the US newspaper wants to keep tracking Limerick’s bid for hurling immortality, then it might be a good idea.
It was interesting to see how the Limerick success story has gone global with one of the most established newspapers in the world turning up at last year’s Allianz Hurling League final in Páirc Ui Chaoimh. That was the day John Kiely’s side added more silverware to a modern dynasty and the piece that subsequently appeared tried to tell the story of that success through Nickie Quaid and others.
What was most striking was how shocked some of the local Kilkenny commentators were afterwards. A couple were visibly pale in the lift going down from the press box to the press conference area after the match. They didn’t see it coming, how Limerick would boss the match so comprehensively. How they would simply take over in the second half.
As a precursor to what was to come in the All-Ireland final when the same two teams met, it was significant.
This idea that the league wasn’t being taken seriously or didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things remains a bit of a fallacy. Look at Limerick and how their All-Ireland triumphs were gathered around back-to-back league titles in 2019 and 2020, a feat the county hadn’t achieved since the great team of the 1930s that featured the iconic presence of Mick Mackey.
At a time when half the rest of the country seemed to be moaning about the lack of jeopardy or cut-and-thrust to the 12-team Division 1 — meant to split evenly between Group A and Group B — Limerick just went and did what they know best — win silverware.
Such was the emphatic nature of their title win last year that the idea quickly formed that the race for the Liam MacCarthy Cup was a race for second.
How quickly the narrative changed when Clare turned the champions over in Munster. As John Kiely was at pains to point out in the immediate aftermath of the league win, it would be lazy to link any pitfalls or stumbles in Munster to league success. Limerick had form and momentum — and the round-robin is bloody hard, no matter what way you approach it.
The previous year, Limerick had put little store on the league and also managed to peak at the right time.
This year, the sense of jeopardy comes with the rejig in format for 2025.
The top three teams in Group A and Group B of Division 1 plus the best fourth-placed finisher will make up a new seven-team Division 1A in 2025.
The big hitters won’t want to finish outside of that because a seven-team Division 1B won’t bring quite the same gates and profile and quality of competition. In 2025, it will be two up and two down in terms of relegation and promotion, so that it’s not a closed shop either.
With John Kiely signing on for just a further year as manager, it’s unlikely that he will be too worried about changed formats or 2025. This year is really all about one thing: Limerick’s bid for a five-in-a-row of All-Irelands which has never been done in the history of the game.
The league always has — and always will be — a sort of testing ground. Not just in terms of players and personnel. At the Allianz launch on Wednesday, Kilkenny’s Richie Reid mentioned how it could be used as a testing ground for a potential TMO, in light of the goal that never was from O’Loughlin Gaels in the All-Ireland club final that looked to have crossed the line.
‘At the minute, we only have HawkEye in Thurles outside of Croke Park. So, as for that, it will have to be done on a trial basis and if it was brought into the stadiums around the country, I think the league would be a great place to trial it.’
The league matters to Reid and Kilkenny to the extent that the player has pushed his honeymoon out to later in the year because he is fit and wants to get a proper pre-season in and not be playing catch-up for the rest of the season.
And he made no bones about manager Derek Lyng wanting to take this campaign seriously with the threat of ending up in Division 1B there. ‘It’s obviously tough. You don’t want to be dropping out of it. The first few games are tough. We have Wexford in Nowlan Park and there’s always a rivalry between us. Then we have Cork down in Páirc Uí Chaoimh the week after, so you kind of want to be picking up points straight away and putting your best foot forward. Derek has said to us that we’ll be taking the league seriously.’
That goes for Cork too, who have forgotten how to win the thing — 1998, the county’s last title, feels like a foreign country. So Pat Ryan and his players have skin in this game.
Davy Fitzgerald’s Waterford is just one more team who will want to put a tough summer behind with an encouraging league and make the top three to guarantee top-flight status for 2025. This year, the sense of jeopardy is very real.
“It’s obviously tough, you want to put your best foot forward”